Mulligan

Im choosing to by pass talking about today, Im still to emotional over the day's events to spend more time thinking about it, so for now Ill choose to skip backwards to yesterday.

Yesterday started another session of my intermediate level class in tennis. I think for now Im stuck at this level, but its a nice level to be stuck at. I can finally play the game well enough to say, "yeah I can play tennis!" and not sink inside thinking to myself, that is if I am really lucky and you are a horrible player. I have really takin a liking to playing on Wednesday mornings. Yes the majority of the other players are all retired "grandpas" but we do have a couple of other females now my age also playing and there is just something that grows on you seeing that you can put a smile on an older man's face.....kind of like the smile I can put on my own grandfathers face. This week coach had us doing another drill I hadn't done in the past. The goal was to focus on each other's backhand (ooof) and run in after serving and volley near the net.....(double ooof). I get nailed when Im by the net toooo often. It was a running joke last week that all but two of the men playing had nailed me..........NAILED me! I seriously have had welts the last few weeks playing, but I don't complain (too much :) )

So we are playing this drill and for the life of me I couldn't understand the rules. That was ok, it seemed the men on the first group I was playing with also couldn't understand them. They had me laughing so hard at times I should have been hit by the ball. See it seems to me that men are more sticklers when it comes to playing by the rules (in sports anyway), women, well we just choose to ignore them :P Usually if he teams all the women up together, we will forgo scoring, why bother it gives us a headache trying to figure it out, so we play for a bit and then well switch sides. More fun that way! These men, no they didn't like that suggestion when I offered it.....go figure! So we finally figured out the rules, then my partner Nick at one point calls a Mulligan, that did it. Distracted me so Yep, I got nailed. Mulligan I asked, after rubbing my thigh, whats a Mulligan? A do over...he replied. In Golf its called a Mulligan, news to me, I didn't remember that there was any times you could "officially" have a do over in golf, but in tennis sure.

So I left the court that morning thinking about "a mulligan" and how that applies to life....... Wouldn't it be sweet if we could have say 3 Mulligan's in our lifetime. Three times in which we could 'do events over'. Instead of 3 wishes, 3 Mulligans.....hmmmm so what would I choose to do over?

This is what I came up with:

• In third grade: I wouldn't dare Jimmy whats his name to throw a rock at my Holly Hobby Lunch box and thus have to carry a dented lunch box to school the rest of the year.
• In 9th grade: I think for those who know me thats a bit obvious, I wouldnt have met Mike at his house that afternoon.
• The last one stumped me....I figured I would pick something from my early childhood to redo, my teen years to redo (since saying my entire teenage period isn't well, realistic) and so that leaves my adulthood so far. What would be the last thing I would redo? Id have to say after thinking it over hard Id redo how I handled recovering from my divorce the first two years. Id have made better choices, financially, relationally, and well allowed more people to help.

The picture above, is one of my assignments in class....